Cleaning and tidying, repenting and returning, and renewal, rebirth and resurrection are all profound human needs. It happens in every realm of human life, like, physical, financial, social, and of course, in moral and spiritual realms. There is something irreducibly human about the desire to start over. We feel it in the urge to throw open windows on the first mild morning of spring, to settle old debts, to write a letter of apology long overdue. Across every domain of life — financial, relational, physical, moral — we are creatures who reach, again and again, for the possibility of renewal. We are not content to remain in our accumulated disorder. Something within us insists that things can be otherwise.
Lent, beginning with Ash Wednesday, gives liturgical form to this insistence. It is the Church's great annual act of honesty: a forty-day acknowledgement that we have wandered, that we are not who we meant to be, and that the distance between where we stand and where God calls us is not insurmountable. It is a season not of punishment but of reorientation — a deliberate turning of the face back towards what we have allowed to fall into shadow.
The Gospel's (Matthew, 6:1-6, 16-18) prescription for this turning is remarkably concrete. Prayer, fasting, and almsgiving — three disciplines that together address the whole architecture of a human life. Prayer attends to the vertical, the soul's relationship with its source. Fasting attends to the body, that stubborn, eloquent instrument through which we live and suffer and love. And almsgiving attends to the horizontal, the network of obligation and solidarity that binds us to one another, particularly to those more vulnerable than ourselves. In their combination, these three practices suggest that genuine renewal is never merely interior. It must take form in the world.
The Language of Ashes
The journey begins, with characteristic humility, in dust. On Ash Wednesday, the priest marks the forehead with the burnt remains of last year's palm branches — those same branches we waved with such confidence on Palm Sunday, singing hosanna to the king of all creation. Within a year, they have become ash. The gesture is almost unbearably eloquent.
Ashes speak a language older than any theology. They are the residue of something that burned brightly, the evidence of beauty that has passed through fire. When we receive them, we are asked to hold two truths simultaneously: that we were made for glory, and that we have, through our own choices and omissions, reduced much of that glory to cinders. The words spoken as the cross is drawn — "Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return" — are not a curse but a clarification. The ashes do not condemn us; they invite us to stop pretending. And in that cessation of pretence, something quietly begins.
Scholars have observed that the entire arc of scripture can be understood as a long act of remembrance — a collective nostalgia for a paradise once known and since forfeited. From the expulsion in Genesis to the New Jerusalem in Revelation, the biblical imagination is shaped by a conviction that things were once otherwise, that there existed a condition of harmony, abundance, and untroubled intimacy with God, and that we carry within us — however dimly, however distortedly — a memory of it.
We see this ache everywhere in the tradition. The prodigal son's return begins not with a plan but with a memory, a nostalgia: "How many of my father's hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death!" It begins with nostalgia — with the recognition of a lost abundance, and the dawning conviction that it need not remain lost. He does not know how he will be received. He has rehearsed a speech of atonement that his father will not allow him to finish. What he has not anticipated is the quality of the welcome: the father running towards him while he is still a long way off, the robe, the ring, the feast.
In the lost sheep, valued beyond all proportion to its smallness, because belonging matters in ways that arithmetic cannot capture. In Israel's wandering through the desert, sustained by manna but always longing for the land of promise — a forty-year journey that Lent consciously mirrors and condenses into forty days.
This nostalgia is not mere sentiment. It is theological in its structure: it presupposes that we were made for something better than we currently inhabit, and that our disquiet in the present is itself a form of witness to the glory we have lost. The hunger we feel — for peace, for wholeness, for a life undivided against itself — is not a problem to be solved by distraction or accumulation. It is a compass. It points, always, towards the God from whom we have wandered, and towards the reunion that Lent dares us to pursue.
Abstinence as Statement: The Sacred No
To abstain is to speak. This is perhaps the most easily overlooked truth about Lenten fasting — that the renunciation of food, or comfort, or habit, is not a merely negative act. It is a declaration. When the body is denied what it ordinarily receives without thought, it is being asked to testify to a deeper hunger, to acknowledge that we do not live by bread alone, and that what we have been filling ourselves with has not, in fact, filled us.
The novelist Han Kang illuminates this dynamic from an unexpected angle. In The Vegetarian (2007), the protagonist Yeong-hye abandons meat in a society where meat is central to social and familial life. Her abstinence is not a dietary preference; it is a rupture, a refusal, a way of saying no to what she experiences as the inherent violence embedded in her world. It is, Kang suggests, a kind of purification ritual — agonising precisely because it is taken seriously, and disturbing to others precisely because it forces them to confront what they have accepted without examination.
Abstinence here is a resistance to normalized violence. The act of eating meat is portrayed as a, or perhaps the, central act of normalized, patriarchal, and systemic violence. By rejecting meat, Yeong-hye rejects her role as an obedient, passive wife in a society that objectifies her. It is a "sacred no". Yeong-hye's, the protagonist's, decision is not a dietary preference but a "quiet refusal" to be a participant in a violent, consumption-driven world. Her ultimate goal is to remove herself from the cycle of violence, trying to escape the "human" condition entirely, eventually attempting to become a tree, which she perceives as pure and non-destructive.
This, the act of abstinence, is interpreted as a severe illness or madness by those around her, including her husband and father, leading to forced feeding and her ultimate hospitalization. The novel highlights that such absolute refusal, while aiming for purity, leads directly to self-destruction. Her refusal to be a "part of the violence" ultimately leads her to, almost, cease to exist as a person.
Yeong-hye's "sacred no" is, of course, not Christian in its framework, but it illuminates something that the Lenten tradition has always known: that abstinence, when it is genuine, is revolutionary. It refuses the ordinary consolations by which a society anaesthetises itself. It insists that the way things are is not the way things must be. And in doing so, it creates a space — uncomfortable, exposed, full of possibility — in which genuine transformation can begin.
Our Lenten abstinence ought to carry this quality of statement. When we fast, we are not simply reducing our caloric intake. We are refusing, for a season, to be defined by appetite. We are making a statement to ourselves and to the world around us, that we believe in a different ordering of things.
To observe Lent seriously in contemporary Western culture is already, in a modest but genuine way, a counter-cultural act. We live in a civilisation organised around the maximisation of comfort and the instantaneous satisfaction of desire. To fast is to resist this logic at the level of daily life. To pray is to insist that the inner life has a claim on time that efficiency does not automatically override. To give alms is to acknowledge a solidarity that the market does not recognise.
Yeong-hye's vegetarianism disturbs those around her not merely because of what she refuses to eat, but because her refusal makes visible the violence that everyone else has normalised. Lent is the Church's annual act of remembering what we are for: not merely to consume and be comfortable, but to love, to give, and ultimately, to be transfigured.
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